Free The Samaritan by Mason Cross

fully understand.
    “You ever think about what you would do, Jon?” she asked before she could stop herself. “If your kid was that age, if—”
    Mazzucco cut her off mid-sentence, still looking at the door as he spoke. “I don’t think about it. Ever.”
    After that, the conversation was sparser than was usual for most of the drive back downtown. They barely exchanged a word for the first ten minutes, each of them lost in thought. When Mazzucco grimaced and shifted in the passenger seat, Allen gratefully seized the chance for a break from the subject.
    “ Tauruses ,” she growled, in a passable imitation of her partner’s voice.
    The Ford Taurus was the department’s anointed replacement for the old Crown Victoria, a venerable warhorse that had finally been put out to pasture. Mazzucco, at six two, was no fan of the reduced legroom in the new cars.
    “Clue’s in the name,” he said, not for the first time. “ Los Angeles Police Department. We spend half the shift in the car, so you’d think they coulda given a little more consideration to comfort.”
    “You’re right. Maybe they’ll go for limos next time they change the contract.”
    They reached the office of the LA County medical examiner just before three o’clock. The Medical Examiner was a very thin, very bald man in his sixties named Burke. He wore a white coat that was probably in the slimmest size available, but it looked baggy on him. On his hands were heavy rubber gloves with the cuffs turned up. He ushered Allen and Mazzucco into the mortuary where Kelly and the other two, still officially unidentified, women lay. The room was cold, in temperature and in color: a polar blue. Harsh fluorescent lighting bleached every shadow.
    Burke located the correct drawers by their locker numbers and pulled them out. The three bodies, covered with thin green sheets, lay on sloping metal tables within each drawer. Burke ambled past the three drawers, unceremoniously whipping back the shroud from each corpse. Allen winced as she saw the most decomposed body, the one they’d yet to identify. The yawning tear in her throat that had practically decapitated her.
    “Any further forward in identifying our victims, Detective Mazzucco?” Burke asked in a bored tone of voice that implied he didn’t much care either way. He didn’t look at either detective, but as usual, favored Mazzucco over Allen if he had to address one of them. Allen wasn’t sure if he had a particular problem with her, but decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was just a sexist prick.
    Mazzucco smiled and said nothing, deferring to Allen because it irritated him, too.
    “As a matter of fact, yes,” Allen said. She looked at the most recent of the three victims. “Kelly Boden. She was a waitress, worked at a pancake joint over on Sepulveda. We just came from talking to her father.”
    Burke shrugged. “One out of three isn’t bad, I guess.”
    “It isn’t bad at all,” Mazzucco interjected, “considering the three of them came out of the ground a couple of hours ago. And as a matter of fact, we think we have an ID for this one, too. So I guess it’s over to you, Doc.”
    Burke didn’t flinch at the rebuke, but he did turn to look at them. “I daresay I’ll have more to offer after the autopsies, but at the moment . . .” He waved a hand at the three decimated bodies before them. “What you see is what you get.”
    “Meaning?” Allen prompted.
    “Meaning you have three white women of roughly similar age. They’ve all been tortured with knives.” He paused and let his dull, colorless eyes run over the three forms. “Minimum of five different types of blade, I’d say. The killer has a tool kit. Signature wounds on the cheeks make it clear that he is attempting to make some sort of statement . . .”
    “Attempting?” Mazzucco repeated, raising an eyebrow.
    If Burke heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it, just continued unabated. “And, of course, it looks